Online support centers may operate based on an asynchronous communication between customers and support engineers. Online collaborative tools for IT (information technology) support, such as JIRA Service Desk or other service desk management systems, can allow customers to remotely communicate with support engineers via a web portal. A customer with a malfunctioning service or product can initiate the communication with the support team by creating a new ‘issue’ in the system (also referred to herein as a ‘ticket’ or ‘case’). The issue tracking computer system can assign the ticket to any available support engineer, and the communications between customer and the support engineer can initiate to find a solution to the problem.
Tickets may refer to data structures that include a description of the issue, details as to who opened the ticket (e.g., customer and contact details), and/or the severity of the issue with respect to damage to the customer business. Updates may be performed in text format, for example, by e-mail, and may be registered by the system for later analysis. In some instances, customers and support engineers can schedule a remote session to look at the issue in customer environment. Documents such as logs or screenshots can be uploaded with each ticket update. An issue may be considered resolved upon explicit customer approval, or upon absence of further customer updates within a defined period of time. Such support services may entail several benefits for the service provider or the software/product vendor, as the number of required engineers may be lower than those required by assisting customers through direct phone calls. Unfortunately, customer satisfaction may be reduced due to the slower and potentially more inefficient support process.
In order to avoid customer dissatisfaction, more resources and/or higher priority may be allocated based on the severity and/or urgency of the issues. For example, some systems may rely on a self-assessment survey sent to customers at ticket creation, and/or on the expertise of support engineers to identify the severity and/or urgency of issues. To detect customer dissatisfaction earlier, support services may implement a process to let customers warn the support engineers that a ticket is taking too long to solve and it is affecting their business, referred to as escalation. Customers can thus ‘escalate’ issues if they feel the support engineers may be underestimating the severity and/or if the speed of response may be negatively affecting their business. Supervision of escalated tickets may be increased, and more resources may be devoted to resolution. The number of escalations may thus be an indicator of customer dissatisfaction with the service and/or a key performance indicator (KPI) used in companies to understand the level of quality of the customer support team.